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Until the voice is solid, the plot doesn’t matter

Still doing my thing where I work on a number of projects simultaneously (it’s possible I’ll one day refer to this as my ‘really stupid way of working’ period). Anyway on one of the projects I was spinning my wheels, trying to figure out the main character’s backstory, but ultimately I realized that the problem was that the character’s longing wasn’t really coming through in the voice.

Longtime readers ought to remember that I’ve always been very concerned with the problem of how to capture longing. The first step is to figure out the longing you want to write about / with, but the second, and equally difficult, step is to put it somehow on the page. In this case it wasn’t happening.

I’d say that this is where the art lies. Because there is something in the texture of the words that conveys longing. It’s in the diction, the punctuation, the rhythm, and the cadences. It’s in the way the camera’s eye notices detail and conveys information. The progression of sentences in a novel is also the leading edge of a consciousness, and unless that consciousness is animated by powerful concerns, the novel falls flat.

Now how do you, as the author, work on creating that effect? Welllllllll…I don’t know. But it usually involves a lot of trying and a lot of failing.